Julianna Morris - Undercover In Glimmer Creek

At the end of the day she stepped out of Old City Hall and saw Gabe emptying a trash can in the park.

She sighed and walked over, wondering if she’d been too curt with him earlier.

“Hasn’t your shift ended?” she asked.

“I looked at the maintenance checklist and saw a few things that didn’t get done today because of the quake. So I told Liam I’d take care of the ones that were highest priority. I’m just finishing up.”

“I appreciate it, but be sure to put in for overtime.”

Gabe cleared his throat as she started to turn away.

“Tessa, why are the broken ceramic pots a big deal? They’re just flowerpots.”

She hesitated, unsure he’d understand how it hurt her father to lose anything connected to her mother. She’d never seen two people as close as her parents. They’d lived for each other, and that made it even harder to think about falling in love herself. How could anything live up to the standard her mom and dad had set? At the same time, she really wanted children. She knew she could do that on her own, but if possible, she wanted to give her kids a mom and a dad.

“I’ve mentioned that my mother designed the gardens. She died unexpectedly a year and a half ago, and Pop is still struggling,” Tessa said slowly, trying to ignore the empty sensation in her stomach. “He feels connected to Mom when he’s surrounded by the things she loved, so when he found the pots were damaged, it was like losing another little part of her.”

“You, too?”

“In a way. Have you ever lost someone who meant that much?”

“I saw death in the navy, but nobody close.”

“I’m sure it’s still hard to lose someone you’ve served with or were trying to help.”

A strained expression flashed across Gabe’s face and was gone so fast she couldn’t guess the source. Despite the way he’d dismissed the deaths he’d seen, it seemed to her that few people were genuinely impervious to sorrow. They just pushed it down and refused to acknowledge it existed. Still, whatever pain Gabe might feel, he deserved his privacy.

“You were telling me about your mother,” he prompted as he replaced the liner in the trash can he’d emptied.

“My mom got involved in everything, whether it was the church rummage sale or a campaign to buy new books for the library. It seemed impossible she could go so quickly. The whole town was in shock when she died. Everybody adored her.”

* * *

GABE WAS WILLING to concede that many parents were better than his, but Tessa’s mother must have had her share of faults, and putting her on a pedestal couldn’t be productive.

It was just one of those strange things that happened with grief.

One of his men had lost his fiancée in a skiing accident, and after he returned from the funeral, he’d called her the most beautiful and talented woman in the world, along with a few other superlatives. He’d also seemed distracted and depressed and had spent a great deal of time reading his fiancée’s Bible. Gabe had sent him to the base chaplain for counseling and then put him back on leave.

“How did your parents meet, anyway?” he asked, trying to keep his tone casual. It still seemed curious that Patrick Connor’s son had ended up in a town like Glimmer Creek.

“After Pop got out of the army, he didn’t want to go into the business right away, so his father sent him to Glimmer Creek to sell the family holdings here. A week after arriving, he met my mom at an ice-cream social, and it was love at first sight. They got married a month later.”

“That sounds like the plot of one of those sappy made-for-TV Christmas movies,” Gabe muttered, a second later realizing how rude he must have sounded.

Tessa’s lips thinned, then she smiled. “It does, doesn’t it? We used to joke about it. Pop would say he wanted Tom Hanks to play him and Meg Ryan to play my mom.”

“Did your mother have Meg Ryan’s blond hair and blue eyes?”

“Yup, just like me. Only Mom was taller. I’m the shrimp in the family.”

“I’m having trouble sorting out your relatives. They seem to be everywhere.”

“That isn’t surprising. My mom’s side of the family is all over Glimmer Creek, and a lot of them work for us.”

“But your paternal grandfather owned Poppy Gold?”

“That’s tied up with the town’s history and how Poppy Gold was originally called Connor’s Folly. Glimmer Creek was a mining camp during the 1849 Gold Rush, and Seamus O’Connor, my great-great-something grandfather, got rich here.”

Gabe tried to recall the California history he’d learned as a kid. “I thought most of the forty-niners barely found enough gold to buy food, much less become wealthy.”

“Yeah.” Tessa grinned. “That’s because they were paying three dollars for a single egg and twenty-five dollars a pound for cheese. Seamus quickly realized he could earn more gold selling groceries to prospectors than by breaking his back panning for it. Eventually he sold supplies from Placerville to Sonora. Made a fortune, even by today’s standards.”

Gabe frowned. “Where does the folly come in?”

“Well, in the late 1880s Seamus dropped the O from the beginning of his last name and moved his base of operations to San Francisco. But his great-grandson, James Connor, was a huge believer in preserving cultural heritage...or at least the heritage of the family business. So during the Great Depression, James came back and bought the old part of Glimmer Creek, piece by piece, to preserve it.”

“He was buying when everyone else was losing their shirts,” Gabe mused.

“That’s one way to look at it. James paid top dollar for the Victorians and remaining gold miners’ cabins, along with two hotels, the concert hall, courthouse, stores and city hall. Heck, he even purchased the old 1851 jail. Basically, almost everything from the town’s historical and cultural heyday. He couldn’t get the library that Andrew Carnegie built for Glimmer Creek, but almost everything else went.”

“Which is why the townspeople called it Connor’s Folly,” Gabe guessed.

“Yup, they laughed all the way to the bank. Even more after James bought the train station—trains had long since stopped running through the area. But he gave the town enough funds to build a new city center and modernize the water and sewer system, so Glimmer Creek thought it was worthwhile to relocate their operations.”

“Generous of him.”

Tessa nodded. “The way everybody saw it, James Connor spent a fortune on worthless land and buildings, and they got the money they needed to survive the Depression. Everybody was happy, though Glimmer Creek often worried that the Connors would eventually sell to developers.”

“Which meant they were happy when your father fell in love with a local girl and decided to live here.”

“Thrilled.”

“So how many relatives do you have?”

“Quite a few, though on the Connor side it’s just Pop and my grandparents in San Francisco. Mom, on the other hand, had nine brothers and sisters. Except for Uncle Kurt, all of them have three or more kids, as well. Most live around Glimmer Creek, along with great-aunts and great-uncles and all sorts of first and second cousins.”

Gabe suspected that tracking Tessa’s relatives could be a challenge. Rob had suggested asking her to help in the investigation, but she was still a suspect. Even if she wasn’t guilty, it seemed as if half of Poppy Gold employees were her relatives—and statistics alone suggested that one of them might be involved in the information thefts from TIP. Being related to Tessa wouldn’t necessarily keep them from seizing an opportunity to make illicit money.

And if she was responsible for the thefts, the damage to Poppy Gold Inns would be incalculable.